A cool, custom treat

For local chefs, ice cream offers a blank palette that inspires creative flavors - from garden mint to mandarin orange and Sriracha

Jun. 15, 2012

Jesse Lauer, head pastry chef at The Bearded Frog in Shelburne, scoops an experimental batch of Sriracha ice cream into a container. The restaurant prides itself on serving ice cream with creative flavors that match the bold palette of the rest of the restaurant's menu. / ELLIOT deBRUYN/Free Press

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Why make house-made ice cream? For the flexibility to be creative, say local chefs.

“If you buy ice cream, you’re limited to the flavors that are available,” Jesse Lauer, pastry chef at Shelburne’s The Bearded Frog, said.

But he wanted to be able to create flavors that matched the bold palette of the rest of the restaurant’s menu.

“When we started out, I wanted to make our own sorbets. My mother had one of those hand-crank ice cream makers, and so our first five months it was all hand-cranked. Then we lost one piece, and then we had to splurge on a real machine,” Lauer said.

“We buy vanilla ice cream because we couldn’t keep up with the demand for it, but we always have three flavors of sorbet on the menu. And the first ice cream on the menu was a star anise, something you just can’t go out and buy.”

Some recent flavors were raspberry-rosewater, angelica-rhubarb and strawberry-cardamom.

The flavor that stands out in his mind was a customer favorite called “Decadence” that featured foie gras and truffle, high-end French brandy and fleur de sel caramel.

“It was an idea that was so weird. We ran it as a special and public response was out of control so it ended up on the menu,” Lauer said.

Whatever the flavor, Lauer says the approach is pretty much the same.

“Ice cream is just cooked and frozen creme anglaise, which is basically a custard sauce with cream, sugar and egg yolks that’s cooked over simmering water until the egg yolks thicken,” he said.

As far as inventing flavors, he shares, “I like to go toward ingredients that don’t go in desserts. I think about the cuisine that I’m dabbling in. Like right now, we’ve got a mandarin orange and Sriracha (hot sauce) compote on the dessert menu, which was inspired by a walk down the aisle in an Asian market in Burlington.”

When it comes to flavors, he says, “Just go for it.”

A dessert to match the meal

For Jay Vogler at Pizza on Earth in Charlotte, the question was how to provide the right dessert to go with the wood-fired pizzas.

An Italian dessert was the answer.

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“Gelato was a logical item since it’s Italian like the pizza,” Vogler said.

Gelato, he explained, is different from ice cream in that it’s churned more slowly, and it contains only milk, egg yolks, sugar and flavorings — it has no cream. For Vogler, that’s a plus.

“With ice cream, you get a lingering feeling in your mouth because of the fat in the cream. But the gelato has a more refreshing quality — you swallow, and it’s gone.”

“We have three standard flavors —vanilla, chocolate, natural mint chip — and then we get very experimental and try different ones, as well as others that we seasonally rotate through. Like if we get local blueberries we try that, or we might try something herbal,” he continued.

Vogler’s favorite is caramel, and the mint chip is not what you might be used to, he said, because the mint is from his garden, not an extract. The flavors vary by season.

“In the fall we’ll go into herbal and nut flavors, like roasted pistachio. In the height of summer we get into tropical flavors like mango and coconut. It’s inspirational, as you go through the season different flavors just occur to us to do,” Vogler said.

He thinks that gelato is a good fit for home cooks with smaller machines. “Most of the recipes that come with the machines include gelato, and the home machines churn pretty slowly to give the right texture,” he said. Like with ice cream, the steps are to scald the milk, beat the eggs and sugar and then cook it to the right temperature.